A US investment bank is predicting that by 2011 the largest portion of Apple's revenue will come from the iPhone. To get there of course, Apple's iPhone must do well in China. So it stands to reason that Apple's engineers are burning the midnight oil to get the iPhone experience just right for the largest market in the world. Apple's patents show us how the iPhone's virtual keyboard is available in Chinese and that a special application is set to accept handwritten input of characters on the iPhone, much like the way that Apple's MacBook does using OS X Snow Leopard's innovative Chinese character input.
Apple's engineer's state that "input methods for devices having multi-language environments can present unique challenges with respect to input and spelling correction which may need to be tailored to the selected language to ensure accuracy and an efficient workflow."
In Apple's patent 20090226091 we see FIGS. 3C and 3D at the top of the graphic where a "user can draw a handwritten input in the handwriting area. The device can compare the handwritten input to characters and words in a dictionary, corpus, repository, or the like. For example, the device can compare the handwritten input against Chinese characters and words formed from Chinese characters in a Chinese character dictionary. Characters or words in the dictionary that include an initial character matching or resembling the handwritten input can be identified as candidates. The bottom FIG. 3D noted above is from another Apple patent (20090225041) which deals with the virtual keyboard in Chinese.
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